Facebook Declares New Era for Advertising

As I write, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is announcing its long-awaited ad strategy. One piece is Beacon, a system that will let the social network’s members reveal their purchases, eBay product postings, and other things they’ve done on some 40 Web sites (so far) off-Facebook and have them appear on their profiles. That ultimately can provide advertisers with information to target ads to just the people most likely to be interested.

You can’t accuse Zuckerberg of modesty. In introducing Facebook Ads, he declared that “the next hundred years will be different for advertising, and it starts today.” Since a colleague in New York is the one attending the Facebook event, for now I’m depending on coverage from others, in particular TechCrunch, which is liveblogging the event. But here’s the gist from Facebook’s release, with the full version after the jump: